The man who attacked Salman Rushdie was shocked to see him alive

Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie accused of assault in New York has expressed “surprise” at the author’s survival.

Jailed Hadi Matar told the New York Post in an interview that she was shocked to hear that Rushdie had survived the attack. She said that when she learned from a tweet last winter that the author was coming to the Chautauqua Institute, she decided to go there.

Matar told the newspaper, “I don’t like this person. I don’t think he is a very good person.” He said, “He is someone who attacked Islam. He attacked their faith.”

Matar said he considered Iran’s late supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khamenei to be a “very good person” but would not say that he was following any fatwa issued by Khamenei in Iran in 1989.

Khamenei had issued a fatwa to kill Rushdie over his book, The Satanic Verses.